Whiskey River (29 page)

I said, “What about Barberra?”

“Tell Joey he’ll be back in the garage tomorrow. It’s healthy to sweat a little.” Jack stretched a bill between his hands, held it up to the bulb in the ceiling. I guessed he was looking for Series 1921. Joey had experimented with counterfeiting ten years before and given it up as too risky.

“He’ll want to hear I saw him.”

He put back the bill and dropped the lid. It wouldn’t close now so he let it gape. “Lon, take him back.”

I followed the former ace through a bedroom that had to be Celestine and Springfield’s—the bottom drawer of the bureau had been pulled out and lined with towels to serve as a crib, and a rectangular framed sepia print hung on the wall above the iron bed showing two rows of solemn-looking Negroes in baggy white baseball uniforms, the front row down on one knee leaning on their bats—up to a closed door that he unlocked with a key he took down from atop the doorframe. He pushed it open but didn’t go in. I got the impression I shouldn’t either.

It had originally been a walk-in closet and had probably served as a storeroom at one time, but not lately because the poor don’t have anything to store. It had no windows and only a chain fixture, with the bulb removed so that the only light in the room came through the door. Barberra was sitting up on a folding cot, one of those wood-and-canvas army assembly affairs, in a shirt that needed changing and wrinkled trousers and his white socks, the soles black with dirt, his wrists and ankles bound with wire. In that light he looked balder than Baldy Hannion, the Oklahoma train robber, whom it was commonly believed Barberra himself had killed, but not as bald as Joey Machine’s Washington lawyer, Cranston, who shaved even his fringe; but his scalp was as naked as a skull and just as white. It didn’t look as if it had ever had hair. He blinked in the light, he had a two-day carpet of black beard. The little room smelled of dirty socks and a white enamel chamber pot under the cot, which was empty at the moment but would always be tainted no matter how thoroughly it was scrubbed and disinfected. And beneath that, garlic.

Lon closed the door and locked it, replaced the key, and we returned to the kitchen. We passed Celestine in the bedroom, tucking the baby into its makeshift crib and humming, perhaps unconsciously, the “Royal Garden Blues,” now playing on the phonograph. Jack or someone had changed the record.

“He doesn’t look too happy,” I told Jack.

“Stink wouldn’t be happy being happy. He thinks you got to be mean all the time to do people. He’s healthy, that’s what counts, like they say.” He was straightening the stacks of bills in the suitcase. Andy was watching him, looking fascinated more by the action than the money, like a dog staring at the hand that’s pointing instead of what it’s pointing at. Vern Scalia, watching from his post by the door, was definitely interested in the money. I could see the bills reflected in his eyes—blue to go with his red hair, courtesy of some ages-dead Viking visitor to Sicily—the gray tip of his tongue coming out to wet the groove in his cleft lip. I’d disliked him on sight.

Springfield, looking as if he had never held a baby in his life or predicted its future, stood with his hands in the pockets of his overalls, the way he always did when he wasn’t using them, scrutinizing one of the newspapers on the wall, as if it weren’t his apartment and he didn’t see them every day. He was staring at a six-month-old picture of a Coast Guard officer with gold braid on his cap swinging a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne at the bow of a new cutter designed to outrun any bootlegging craft on the river; an obsolescence even before its hull got wet. I knew then that I would never be at home among these men, one of them, honorary or otherwise. They were always waiting for me to leave so they could get on. I don’t know why it bothered me, but it did.

The Pious Heart
was there, of course, hanging all alone in its gummy devotion in the middle of a patch of plaster with a fresh crack running through it—caused, no doubt, by the nail that supported the picture. You could track Jack through the city by the nails he left behind to hold up that devout adolescent.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Jack was still sorting. “Thanks, Connie. Sorry you lost sleep.”

“I don’t want to do this again.”

“Can’t blame you. Stink’s hard enough to take dressed and barbered.”

“You know what I mean. Next time call someone else.”

“If that’s what you want.”

I hesitated. “You’re letting him go in a few hours, right?”

“I said I was.”

“Your word’s not worth shit, Jack. Everybody knows it.”

He looked up, a brick of bills in each hand. I felt a flash of the old paralysis. He wasn’t subject to rages, but you just never knew what he was going to do. A beat, then he grinned. “Get some sleep, Connie. I ain’t so crazy I’d chop down the money tree. Not yet.”

Vern Scalia opened the door for me and I went out. When I think of Jack I usually see him the way he looked that night as I was leaving, a boy in a gangster’s thick-muscled body with his hair grown back out long and curling, the upright V of his broad shoulders and narrow waist and the inverted V of the shoulder rig over his ribbed undershirt describing a perfect diamond. Fast music playing. The next time I saw him he was dying.

The Black Bottom at half-past one, ante meridiem: puddles of blue neon and red argon on the sidewalks, as if a Martian had taken a leak on every corner; fat, middle-aged Negroes in belted coats with Chesterfield collars and yellow spats and big Panamas, the uniform of the policy baron, by special arrangement with Hizzoner Joey G. Machine; old colored men in soft caps and holey sweaters drinking from bottles wrapped in paper bags; young shines practicing their steps on corners for their big break at the Graystone Ballroom downtown; small black boys running, threading their way through knots of saloon-hoppers, clutching paper sacks full of policy slips; willowy Negresses in ostrich feathers and monkey-fur collars hanging all over white men in fedoras and peaked lapels, the men grinning lopsidedly with gold-foil-wrapped bottles under their arms, clutching pairs of long-stemmed glasses, taking the party down the street and up the stairs; a friendly place for the next half hour, at the end of which the unwritten curfew kicked in and then it would be everyone to his own side of town and God help the white man whose watch stopped. Night belonged to the Negro; it could be rented by the other side, but not bought.

I parked by a booth on Harper and called the garage. The wind shifted while I was dialing and sticky blue smoke drifted from an alley where three coloreds in red band jackets were smoking muggles. I closed the door.

“You
see
Barberra?” demanded Joey when I told him I’d made the delivery.

“He’s okay. Jack says you’ll have him back in the morning.”

“It’s morning now.”

“After daylight, then. He looked like they’ve been treating him well enough.”

“Fuck I care how they’re treating him? I just want him breathing and in one piece. The kike tell you what he did to Nick Salerno?”

“I don’t think he meant to hit him that hard.”

“Where they holed up?”

It shouldn’t have thrown me. I’d thought my silence on certain things was a given, bestowed on me by right of my trade. But Joey didn’t recognize rights, didn’t understand givens. I said, “If I told you that, no one in this town would trust me to tell me it’s raining.”

“Trust, I trust that suitcase I sent you up there with. When you got dough you don’t need trust. Who was there?”

“His gang.”

“That motherfucker Scalia was there, wasn’t he?”

I said he was. It wasn’t the first time Jack had underestimated Joey.

“That shitbag, that snake-fucking Sicilian son of a mangy whore. That ass-kissing back-stabber.”

There was more of this. I could never tell how much of his famous tantrums was real and how much staged to buy him time to think. The murders carried out in his name were too well orchestrated to have been the product of simple fury.

At length he ran out of vituperatives. His breathing was more phlegmatic than usual. Then the line went dead.

“You’re welcome,” I told the dial tone.

M
OUSE,
I
’M NOT GOING
to beg you,” I said. “There are stories and stories, and even the ones I
get
are deader than Isadora in twenty-four hours.”

“Not this one,” he said, jigging in his seat like a kid. On top of being a midget, Mouse was high-strung, and when you managed to get him off his feet he was always drumming his pudgy fingers and bouncing the foot crossed on his knee and jerking his head around as if he suspected someone was gunning for him. He kept his porkpie and oversize coat on indoors and out regardless of the season. I think he thought they made him look bigger, whereas they had the opposite effect, creating the impression that county officials had finally found a way to get rid of the downtown lobbyists by shrinking them. “I ain’t sure I should tell it to you, though. I’m thinking of shifting my operation to the Federal Building. I need a lever there.”

I signaled a passing waiter for another round. We were sharing a table in the Green Lantern in Ecorse, candles stuck in green prewar wine bottles on red-and-white-checked tablecloths within earshot of the crap tables in back. The waiter, also prewar—black handlebars and a bow tie—brought me a beer and a vodka gimlet for Mouse and left with our empty glasses. When Mouse lifted his glass to sip, I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the ring. He set the glass down on top of it.

“Thank you kindly, Connie. Things are slow at County since they kicked Jack Dance. It’s like he took the heart right out of the reform movement.”

“Is that why you were in the Federal Building, where you saw whatever it is you saw?”

“I didn’t see it. I heard it. A friend of mine saw someone getting into an elevator.”

“You don’t have any friends, Mouse. Just clients. Who’d he see?”

But he wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet. Like all small men, and Danny Moskovitch was the smallest I knew who didn’t talk with a sissy accent while Edgar Bergen drank a glass of water, he liked being the center of attention. “What do you know about due process?”

“J. Edgar Hoover calls you a yellow rat and you go to jail for a thousand years. Get to the point.”

“What would you say if I told you my friend saw Orville Cranston getting onto an elevator with one of the jurors in the Machine tax evasion case?”

He had me then. His sharp little face bent into a series of happy triangles, he drummed his fingers and bounced his foot. I folded my arms on the table. “What’s the friend call himself?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I reached and snapped the twenty out from under the glass without spilling it. Big-deal Houdini stuff.

“Hey!”

“I can buy twenty rumors for a buck, Mouse. I need a name. The juror’s if not your friend’s.”

He looked troubled. “He didn’t say which juror. I got to clear it with him before I tell his name. It’ll cost you another twenty for his cut.”

“Take it out of your end.”

“That ain’t fair, Connie. Ten’s what I slip bailiffs to tell me what goes on in the jury room.”

“I’m bleeding, Mouse.” I sat back folding the bill between my fingers while he turned over his conscience, not exactly a job for a heavy lifter. I’d have paid him fifty if the tip was good, but he didn’t need to know that. Evidence that an attorney had established contact, accidental or otherwise, with a member of the jury in a client’s case was grounds for a mistrial at least. In this specific situation I suspected that more had passed between the two than just the time of day.

Mouse was about to speak, and I knew what his decision was going to be, when our waiter came back and told me I had a call. The caller wouldn’t identify himself. I said shit and got up. “Hold the thought, Mouse.”

“It’s almost lunchtime. I got to get back to County and earn supper.”

“I’ll make it quick.” I let him see me fold the twenty into my vest pocket.

The telephone was on the wall in the craproom. Eddie Berman the bouncer, a gray lump in a checked jacket, who bore no small resemblance to an iguana and carried an ash cane he used to pry fatmouths off their feet, shuffled away a discreet yard or so while I lifted the earpiece. The first thing I heard after I said hello was a long hawking gurgle, followed by a small explosion and then a rustle of paper tissue. “Minor?”

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Gabriel?”

“You know the Ferry warehouse?” He didn’t seem surprised that I’d guessed who he was.

“Brush and Lafayette,” I said.

“Second floor, northwest corner. There’s a friend of yours here.”

I hung up fifteen seconds after he did and returned to the table to make my excuses. But Mouse had left.

Late June was everywhere. The air was bright with hot concrete, soft tar, cotton dresses, and loud radios in uncovered convertibles. I parked on Brush and walked around to the front door of the warehouse, a city block of brick arches and cement cornices the pigeons loved that looked like the Roman Forum, only more ambitious. A uniformed bull I knew slightly let me in and told me they were waiting for me upstairs.

“They who?”

“Lieutenant Gabriel and the chief.”

“Kozlowski?”

“You know another chief?”

A kid in livery, dressed for the offices upstairs, took me up in the elevator. When he opened the cage I stepped out into a wall of sweet grainy odor, the smell of tons of stored seeds and something else, a pleasant, cloying aroma that reminded me of Sunday afternoons after church and roast pork steaming on the table. I got my bearings and headed northwest. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, the shafts smoking with millions of golden seed particles, and lay on the bare floor in rectangular patches as in a cloister walkway.

I recognized the Laurel and Hardy figures of Gabriel and Kozlowski among a group gathered around an object in the corner, a sack of grain or something hanging from the beamed ceiling. A flashbulb flared, the dead bulb was plucked out and tossed to the floor, where it popped like a half-loaded shell in the room’s vastness.